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Saturday, 29 September 2012

Unconnected, yes. I wonder: what
do we mean when we talk about *connected* speech? We must mean
that there is at least one other kind of speech, which is not
connected, so that it makes good sense to talk about its
connectedness at all. But I would very much like to know who uses it,
unless we’re perhaps talking about the so-called one-word stage in
child language development, when spoken
utterances appear to consist of single words, or expecting speech to
and from interlocutors who look like this:

Qualifying speech with the modifier
connected also means that we somehow take “connected speech”
as a special case of speech – or it wouldn’t need qualification
by means of a dedicated adjective. This is the same kind of reasoning
which identifies some people through the qualifier multilingual,
thereby leaving it understood that there’s no need to identify in
any special way whoever is not multilingual, because there’s
nothing special about their lingualism. In the same way that
monolingualism came to represent default lingualism, unconnected
speech represents default speechiness. One language at a time
is desirable linguistic behaviour, and so is one word at a time
(whatever the word word might mean, incidentally, since nobody
has ever come up with a satisfactory definition of what a “word”
might be).

I wonder why. It could be that the only
way we might hope to identify the words of a language is by looking
at them (assuming, in turn, that we do know what “a language” might be, which is another big linguistic mystery). If you listen
to a language you never heard before, chances are you’ll have
serious trouble attempting to single out its words (assuming, in
turn, that all spoken languages have words, which is yet another moot
question). If you see a spoken language, you may have better luck.
Printed representations of speech, for those languages which have
them, may show spaces separating what in some of them we’ve come to
call words. Others won’t, because speech and whatever we
choose to call its components cannot be adequately represented in
print. It’s like attempting to represent a landscape in speech.
It’s like putting a girdle on things. A picture may be worth a
thousand words, but pictures of words tell you very little about the
thousand different ways they are pronounced, even for those
languages which may share printed representations
that you recognise.

Take my language students, who mostly
come to me after years of traditional vocabulary + grammar language
learning, where “vocabulary” means lists of words (for what
“grammar” means here, see my next post). They keep insisting that speech forms like wanna
and doesn’t, or j’sais pas and t’as vu, or
fàchavor and tá bem, are “bad” language.
They keep reminding me that even native speakers of their new
languages tell them that they use their language “better”,
because they learned it the “proper” all-words-in way, whereas
natives tend to become “lazy” when speaking – more on which in
a future post, too. And I might as well confess that some
students thought better of having me as a teacher, given my tendency
to attempt to wrestle pens and paper and books off their hands and
concentrate on training speaking and listening. This for students who
come to me because they, or their own language students, are unhappy
about matters of intelligibility
from and to users of their new languages.

I don’t blame them. In the textbooks
that they were taught by, and taught to abide by, wannas and
tá bens are either glossed over or treated in special
chapters, whose titles include the phrase “connected speech” and
which come after all the chapters dealing with speech forms which
apparently need no special treatment and so must be the “real”
speech forms. But how do you learn to understand and use a language
by first spending chapters and years memorising and spelling out
citation forms of visually unconnected words? To me, the disconnect
between language teaching and language use is the problem: not
that you say things like gonna
and you’d
and perhaps write them too, but that so many learners are not told
that people say and write these things because this is how people
speak
their languages.

Next time, as
promised, I’ll deal (sorry, I mean I will deal) with the
“grammar” part of the traditional vocabulary + grammar language
teaching methods.

Wednesday, 19 September 2012

Vocal versatility, described as the
ability to make your vocal tract do whatever you want it to do, is
usually discussed in connection with professional voice users. In
contrast, vocal fossilisation, described as the inability to make
your vocal tract move beyond what you’ve grown used to move it for,
is usually discussed in connection with language learners. This makes
it sound like vocal tract users neatly divide into distinct
subspecies, skilled and unskilled, respectively. The point I wish to
make here is that vocal versatility and vocal fossilisation are
related, because as far as vocal uses are concerned, we’re all
pros.

The first observation is that we all
come equipped with the same vocal tract model. Since all languages
are equally difficult to pronounce – or equally easy, if your outlook
on life tends towards optimism – because each language has a
signature sound to it,
the second observation is that the way we sound relates to the uses
to which we put our vocal equipment, rather than to the equipment
itself. In the literature on language learning, the (mortifying)
label fossilisation stands for ‘routine vocal behaviours’.
From learners, as said. For some reason, the word doesn’t apply to petrified accent models that the corporate textbook
industry continues churning out, as I’ve argued before.

Routine behaviours are automated and
taken for granted to such a degree that you come to believe that they
cannot be characterised as specific behaviours
at all, and so that there is nothing that can be changed about them
because they’ve never changed, as far as you can remember. But
fossilised behaviours, vocal or otherwise, are in fact acquired
behaviours. For language learning, the issue is then to identify the
steps through which we all learned to condition our natural vocal
versatility in order to sound proficiently fossilised in at least one
language. We could also call this the ways in which we learned to
speak with intelligible accents.

Getting our steps right involves
training muscles and coordinating their movements to match specific
rhythms. There is a very similar choreography going on in our vocal
tract whenever we speak and, like actors and opera singers, we
learners need a choreographer, whom we could also call our language
teacher, to help us get our vocal
movements right. Teaching you how to get things right doesn’t
mean teaching you the technical jargon used to describe vocal tract
actions, which is familiar to language teachers. You don’t need to
know a third conditional by name either, in order to use it
appropriately – an issue that I’ll address some other time.
Teaching you means making you aware of what you do and what you can
do, when you speak those languages you’re comfortable speaking, so
that you become aware of what you need to do, in order to sound the
way you want to sound in your new languages: you’ll need “a
guided tour of your vocal tract”, and you can treat yourself to a
preview of what this feels like in Chapter 5 of my book The Language of Language.

As with dancing lessons, the age at
which you start your vocal training programme is irrelevant, and so
is the alleged brain shutdown
which is allegedly restricted to language learning. Learning means
instructing your brain to work in ways that it hasn’t worked
before. With competent guidance, and lots, and lots, and lots of
practice, your brain will follow suit because that’s what brains
do. One day you’ll wake up in the morning to find out that your
vocal tract remembers things that you don’t remember teaching it to
do, and that you had no idea it could do. But it could do
them.

The training of your vocal skills
through awareness of your vocal skills is routinely available to
professional voice users. But unlike these professionals, who only
need to give the impression that they can speak the languages that
they’re speaking onstage, we amateurs learn languages because we
need to speak them in real life. This is also why we need real-life
guides to assist us in our learning: if we learn to samba and to
speak from printed images,
we’ll samba and speak like printed images.

The next post deals with a strange conception which, to my mind, could only have
become a standard conception in matters of language teaching and
learning if one assumes that language teaching and language
learning proceed, by default, through printed materials.

Saturday, 8 September 2012

Making yourself intelligible involves
awareness that you may not be intelligible, just like making yourself
presentable involves awareness that you may not be presentable. This
kind of awareness arises from exposure to different people and
different situations, that is, from exposure to different
intelligibilities.

As children, we develop our linguistic
skills largely unaware that we are making ourselves
intelligible, in the sense that we would not be able to explain what
we are doing in so many words (there is a very significant difference
between what you do and awareness of what you do, whether you’re
using a mobile phone or speaking a language, more on which in a
coming post). Nevertheless, monitoring and constructing
intelligibility is exactly what typical language acquisition
involves: we progressively learn to attune our inbuilt speech
production and speech reception equipment (our vocal tracts and our
ears) to uses which satisfy the speech reception and speech
production counterparts, respectively, of those around us.

The key factor here, to me, is “those
around us”. When children eventually end up sounding like those around them,
that is, when they end up making everyday linguistic sense to and
from those around them, their acquisition process is deemed complete
(or “perfect”, as some analysts might prefer). It seems to me
that the same applies to language learners across the board, because
you learn a language in order to use it, and using a language means making it workfor and with those around you. Barring disorder, we are
all intelligible to someone and someone is intelligible to
us, which means that intelligibility is not a feature of the speaker,
or of the listener, but of what both end up negotiating in
order to make sense. Just like there are no “ideal” speakers,
there are no “ideal” listeners either – something to which I’ll
come back soon too.

Intelligibility is also a feature of
the here and now, because speaking and listening are bound by
real-life settings, in place and time. One of my multilingual
friends, who uses English for work-related purposes, has developed
fluent understanding of Texan English from his Texan business
partners. But only in one-to-one situations. When two (or more)
Texans meet in his presence, all hell breaks loose, as he describes
it – and not just because they
eventually start talking about football (N.B.: not “soccer”)
teams and other Texan entities unknown to him. Besides their
vocabulary, they also change their accent and their overall ways of
expressing themselves in English. They do this not because they want
to exclude my friend (though some of us may sometimes deliberately
want to adopt similar strategies for this purpose),
but because it’s only natural to switch among the different ways of
making ourselves intelligible that we’ve learnt to navigate along
our lives. We all do this, we all can
do this – if we so
wish. Perhaps monolingual speakers,
of English and other languages, will have similar stories to share?

My
friend could also learn to understand and produce Texan in-house
vocal ways – if he so wished. Users’ wishes are the reason why I
believe that sticking to the one-standard-fits-all policies which go
on guiding production of traditional language teaching materials
makes little sense. I’m not saying that we should strive to prepare
as many teaching materials as there are varieties of languages: this
is as unrealistic a goal as attempting to make sense of
multilingualism through cumulative descriptions of the number and the
combinations of particular languages involved in each multilingual
setting, as I noted before.
I’m saying that textbook standards are best used as guidelines
for what learners actually need. In some cases, the book-prescribed
accent may match the learners’ needs. In other cases, learners may
end up becoming unintelligible, for
their purposes,
precisely because they were trained to reproduce intelligibility in
varieties of their new languages which fail to serve the reasons why
they decided to learn a new language in the first place. And maybe
this is one of the reasons why so many of us routinely get bad press
about our “non-native” uses: maybe we’re just being differently native?

Since there are no ideal language
users, there can be no ideal language uses either, unless by “ideal”
we mean ‘flexible’: accommodation
to accent variability is the key to intelligible speech production
and perception, as I’ve argued in a paper titled ‘Multilingual accents’.
So why not start in the classroom, because we have to start somewhere
and because classrooms are where this whole business of language
learning starts for so many of us? The next post has some more to say
about this.

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About Me

I’m a freelance
linguist with a keen interest in multilingualism. I was born in
Portugal, acquired French in Africa at age 3, married a Swede a
little later, raised three trilingual children (mostly) in Singapore,
and I work (mostly) in English. Homepage: Being Multilingual

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